When police killed his two best friends in a supposedly accidental shooting, detective Mark Brown left the force bitter and angry, abandoning a promising career and leaving his special skills to languish. A year later, the trail of one of the killers has Mark looking south, to Mexico, just as he receives a mysterious, anonymous, encrypted message over e-mail: The dead demand much more than vengeance. Drawn into the conflict zone by the connection to the deaths of his friends, Mark finds that he has to work on both sides to solve the case, in a place where any mistake could endanger lives – or reignite a war.

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Just got Aristide's statement in the mail. He's leaving Jamaica to go to South Africa. It's actually a nice statement. Read it, read between the lines. And know that the battle for Haiti's future isn't over yet.

Statement by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
May 30, 2004
Kingston, Jamaica

A reader sent me this article in the New Scientist. It is about a neglected aspect of the US/Israel war on the Palestinian population: the fact that it is a water war. I don't have the statistics with me (Vandana Shiva cites a few of them in her book, Water Wars), but Israeli per capita water use is vast compared to Palestinians. Israeli agriculturalists are allowed to dig wells several times deeper than Palestinians.

First, I'm very pleased to note that it seems Tim Wise is blogging again, as well as UTS.

Today's hypocrisy. Looking at the headlines of various newspapers today I saw news of a 'massacre' and a 'bloodbath' in Saudi Arabia by Al Qaeda. It was a brutal hostage-taking operation that was done, and certainly it was both a massacre and a bloodbath. I didn't notice these media outlets calling what Israel did in Rafah a 'bloodbath' or what the US is doing in Najaf right now a 'massacre'.

A couple days ago I blogged about the heroic union SINTRAEMCALI's attempts to stop the creeping privatization of the public utilities company in the city of Cali, Colombia. I noted that it was a high-risk maneuver, and they made a risk assessment yesterday after the National government responded with overwhelming repression and decided to call off the occupation. The assessment of the situation by Nathan Eisenstadt of the Colombia Solidarity Campaign in the UK is mixed:

Now, having read Toufe's piece on moral agency I am not about to try to make some kind of case absolving an artist like Nelly for creating a video in which women are treated in degrading, sexist, and appalling ways. Social change is made by moral agents who decide not to follow the script that is laid down for them. By people who face all the social forces and do not succumb to them. It is these exceptions to the social script that provide possibilities for hope.

Israel and the United States, currently competing to see who can bring more democracy to the Middle East, have achieved notable triumphs in the area of press freedom. Israel, for example, shoots and kills journalists (like the UK's James Miller and over a dozen Arab journalists who die even more invisibly than people like Miller) and international observers (like the UN's Ian Hook) and activists (like the US's Rachel Corrie). Israel bombs radio stations -- it did so as part of its latest attack on Rafah, for example.

I prefer attributed to anonymous sources, but in a context like Colombia where hundreds of union leaders, human rights activists, journalist, lawyers and the like are killed every year for speaking out, I believe exceptions can be made.